I’d like to propose a new hotkey function for Reforged; one to ease the removal of units from control groups.
Right now there are multiple ways to functionally build and add units to control groups: Box dragging, shift clicking, shift+[#], etc. These are all useful for building new groups or making existing groups larger. There are disproportionally fewer ways to make control groups smaller.
During combat, players frequently maneuver individual units back and are forced to rebuild their control groups, which generally requires re-selecting the unit you have sent to retreat. Multiply this times the number of units you have to send back during combat and a lot of actions are spent on something that is not strategically nor mechanically interesting.
I believe there is room here for a new hotkey or hotkey range that makes removing a unit from a group equal effort as adding a unit to group. My suggestion would be to add functionality to Alt as a modifier and move the existing health bar UI functionality to a currently unused hotkey.
Some ideas:
Alt + Click on the group ‘frame’ to deselect and remove that unit from the group (to give distinction from Shift + Click)
Alt + Click on a unit in the game space to remove it from all existing groups
Alt + [#] with a unit selected to remove that unit from that specific control group. E.g. Alt + 1 to remove that unit from control group #1
Alt + [#] with multiple units selected to remove those units from that specified control group.
Thanks for reading.
10 Likes
I’m in favor of this, this is really something I could use as well. The convenience and also lack-there-of a way to quickly remove units from a group usually results in adding an extra action or two and it can be quite cumbersome to control in a micro heavy situations. There is often cases where you want to remove lower health units from groups and suspend them into the background.
I’m all in favor of the proposed additions and the modifier used, since ALT isn’t critically used for anything other than showing unit health bars, but given that there’s a toggle to always show them now, it’s far less essential.
Good idea, btw in SC2 something similar already exists!
2 Likes
really? is that new? never used it in sc2. how does it work there?
Yes, great ideas! Personally, I would like it if we could pre-set our control groups. Maybe blizzard could add both 
like this ----> Pre-set Control Groups in Option - #48
I believe they’ve already confirmed UI functionality for custom hotkeys as shown in that video you provided, including actions that you can’t currently rebind even via customkeys text files such as item slots. Nonetheless, that doesn’t address the issue I bring up in this thread.
Yes I know, but my post wasnt about the video or hotkeys, but its about control groups. Imagine if we didn’t have to manually group each unit when they are trained. Your idea for Alt may also help, and I am all for more options, so maybe both our ideas could both be used together 
Something similar like this exists in sc2 and it is fantastic. I actually rebound the steal command to ctrl+number, so I never have a unit in the same group. For example, for the first few minutes of the game I have my heroes and units on 1 and as the game progresses, I move my ranged heroes to 2. This means I have to make 2 new groups to overwrite my first setup. With the steal command it is just one. This would be also very helpful for scout units or units that got hurt, just select them with the alt command and send them away.
2 Likes
Thanks for the feedback everyone. I hope someone at Blizzard caught this.